Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/24 16:06Welcome everyone to the Interactive City forum, the first of the ISEA2006 online forums. We will be posting here for a week between April 24 to 30, and I am looking forward to the beginnings of an animated conversation that we can extend in San Jose during the events in August and beyond.
I would especially like to welcome the artist participants for the Interactive City forum, Mirjam Struppek, Tapio Mäkelä, Alison Sant, and Franck Ancel, whose works represent a broad and amazingly creative engagement with issues surrounding the formation of the contemporary city and technology. I strongly encourage visitors to read their abstracts posted at http://01sj.org/content/blogcategory/135/144/ and take the opportunity to join with them in an open and ranging conversation about their work and broader positions on the interactive city.
The Interactive City theme comes from a desire to read the city anew, “Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.” And therein lies the potential for the creation not only of a new environment, but a new context. There have been many inspired treatises and imaginings of the city, from Le Corbusier’s Radiant City awash with the energy of new machines; meticulously rational implying an efficiency based in the technotopian dreams of the new machine age, to Jane Jacobs organic city, organized through the millions of small scale everyday interactions of people to people; the expression of the socio-organic body. Both these extremes situate the city as the product of forces, industrial and social, but also as something beyond our immediate reach.
Todays city, and the Interactive City theme imagines a different relationship to the city as an interface, “not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation” and encourages us to locate, express, explore and celebrate our public and personal selves in that relationship. Tapio Mäkelä’s work explores this social nexus, while Mirjam Struppek’s develops these themes through the material/immaterial moment of the public interface. For me, this is the key difference between previous models of the city, where analogies to vehicles and bodies describe the city as a product of events and machines, now the city is an active participant in the creation of events “that matter”. We are thinking beyond descriptive formal models of the city to the potential of an engaged, collaborative and participatory moment.
While the intensive gaze frames the city in one way, extensively the context has changed also. Cities exist within flows of trans-regional and international relations as Manuel Castells amongst others, have so eloquently described. The technologies that frame our lives in the city, are not limited by traditional spatial boundaries, and in many cases flow over and beyond the old city walls. This is the site of Frank Ancel’s global networks, and suggested in Alison Sant’s city beyond the geography of the basemap. Perhaps one of the first questions we might ask of the city today is where does the city begin and end?
To begin the conversations of this forum, I would like to ask each artist author to give a brief description, not necessarily of their paper but of the questions on the city and technology that motivate their work. From there, let the conversations begin and flow where they may.
Anthony Burke Oakland
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STRANGE CITIES:: BLACK BOX
Visitor
Re:Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/26 18:42hi! virtual shanghai explorers
my name is TATIANA:: indeed Shanghai is the melting pot par excellence!
please visit my interactive media research into Shanghai
i have recently completed my doctor of creative arts, university of technology sydney, where i have created an online exploration of my research into my hybrid cultural origins:: one being Chinese BOX reflecting on my Russian grandparents emigre experinece in Shanghai:: tracing their musical memories:: grandad XENIA was a "taxi-dancer" + singer + SERGEI was a jazz orchestra leader for PATHE & played in the legendary Cathay Hotel, Paramount Ballroom, Ladlows Casanova, and the French Club.
also explore the Jewish experience in MENORAH OF FANG BANG LU (tatiana pentes with prof andrew jakubowicz)
Re:Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/27 12:45Hi Anthony, Thanks for your welcome and lets work on a fruitfull exchange!
A new medium allways includes potential for utopian thinking and dreams of a better tomorrow, even though these utopian ideas often might appear naive, they allways revive thinking about a better living together and a more healthy society. Urban planning urgently needs new transdisciplinary input in a more and more complex society. I see a very simple connection between Public Space, Interaction and New Media expressed in my prior work interactionfield.de, encouraging to discover this utopian potential:
Urban public space understood as open, civil space is a key element of the development of european urbanism. In this role as space for representation, culture, encounter through trade, exchange and discussion, it has always been a place, that is becoming alive through various interactions. Interactivity in turn is an important character of digital media, offering new forms of exchange and processes of collaborative production, which has revived the discussions about the development of public sphere based on civic negotiation. On the other hand, possibilites of complex data processing and accummulation of information generated through these interactions influence increasingly our society. Their growing importance start to determine as well our urban life and the shape our city space. The development of Public space acts quasi as mirror of the society reflecting negotiation processes between social, economic and political forces. Our modern culture is dominated by the idea to use technology as a tool to enhance the human living conditions yet technologies for military perpous have too often influenced urban design. Artists point out the increasing ubiquity of New media crystalising in different forms in the urban space, such as surveillance infrastructure, mobile telephony, digital screens, to name only the most obvious ones. They discover their participatory and interactive character to generate new exchange processes in a connection of the new virtual world with the real urban space. This hybrid space and its activating potential is increasingly explored searching for a counter movement against the paralysing dominance of the mass media that determined the last century.
At that time I have developed these categories from an urban planners point of view, of the potential of interactive media projects for urban society:
- promoting interaction, fearless confrontation and contact with strangers - promoting formation of public sphere by criticism, reflection on society - promoting social interaction and integration in the local neighborhood - supporting understanding of the current development of our high-tech society - supporting conscious participation in the creation of public space
Still a few years ago in the very practical oriented field of Urban Planning the influence of the New media onto the Urban Space was long considered as something very emphemeral and invisible, something that its having only very indirekt and unclear effects, more included in the general issue of globalisation, especially in times before the mobilephone appeared. The early experimental media facades have tried to give this emphemeralty a shape, yet have not been taken really serious. But recently digital surfaces appear in more and more shapes and contexts in the urban space that have to be taken seriously as urban infrastructure influencing the visual sphere. And each element that wants to stay longterm in the already often overfurnished urban space needs to justify its existance concerning its function and usefulness considering the growing visual pollution of urban space. Too often modern gadgets are unleashe into the world representing technological advancement yet overstraining its users or creating artificial needs. Screens as well strikingly appear in countries competing for showing off its headway in a global competition such as Asian countries.
They became a very present visible element that is often extremely underused, in terms of use at all or in terms of the quality of content, I here want to question the dominance of the advertising function. Now with new possibilities of connectivity and interactivity could the "old" screens be enhanced in their function and can they become more like a digital mirror of society, covering a wide range of content from a wide range of contributing parties?
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lena welty
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Re:Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/28 13:00Mirjam, thank you for your thoughful post. What I respond to in your screens work is the nature of repurposing of an existing infrastructure, using whats already become so prevalent but in an dumb way, and making it both smarter and more public, especially with the goal of activating a non-commercial imperative. As every surface now has the capacity to carry information of one sort or another, do you have any sense in terms of the city, and drawing on your planning background, as to how we might become more strategic with the use of screens and facades, rather than accepting the kind of ubiquity inherent in the surface technologies now being deployed, perhaps along the lines of the planning principals you outlined in the last post? In terms of shaping the interactive city, a city that develops with us, this seems to suggest an entirely new stratum to the regular planning guidelines. Just because every surface in the city can carry informtion, should it, and how might we again strategize difference in our electronic environment?
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Ancel
Visitor
Re:Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/29 08:34This is my last message on the forum: thank you to all people for writing or reading. I hope to meet you at San José this summer. I seek some new spaces and cities other than Paris or Shanghai to imagine new creations and actions... So, visit my internet website and contact me on http://franck-ancel.com e-by fr_nck have A nice 1th may!
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lena welty
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Re:Interactive City Welcome - 2006/04/30 14:17We have decided to leave the forum open for a few more days than officially posted for further comments, and I continue to invite vigorous participation from visitors and presenters alike. As a way to wrap up this formal part of the forum until we meet in San Jose however, I would like to sincerely thank all the participants for their contributions in animating this introductory session into the interactive city.
Clearly here we have just scratched the superficial layers of issues that deeply motivate and shape the potentials of a startling new polis and citizenry. Questions that remain for discussion are many, ranging from the validity of the “city model” at all, to more nuanced discussions of representation, processes for animating social potentials and negotiating a new politic, as well as the pressing need to partner more intelligently with a complex range of overlapping and maturing technologies.
Also it is clear that locative, screen based and other technology driven practices that shape our environment have and are evolving from an enthusiastic childhood, transcoding the conventions of past critical practices with new technologies, and moving into an awkward adolescence, searching for a deeper identity and conceptual framework and expression of its own.
The role of the critical explorative practice is always vital, yet through the nature of our distributed technologies the sheer number of voices being raised holds the potential for both a carnival and a riot, celebration and revolution. Making some sense of the noise will become more complex, as we learn to live with ambiguity, with the uncertain and the contingent, from Shanghai to San Jose. Reveling in a sea of access and a practiced ubiquity the aspirations of this generation of critical thinkers and practitioners continues to evolve and inspire also, thankfully in forums like ISEA.
I look forward to continuing these conversations when we meet at ISEA2006 in San Jose.
